Braves Diary (2/162)

So this morning I got paged at 6am and was working the issue until 9am. Suffice it to say, I majorly slept in.

By the time I turned the TV on, the Braves were well on their way to being dominated by Zack Wheeler, and they didn’t put up much resistance after he came out. It was a moribund 4-0 loss.

Naturally, the off day yesterday that should have been boring wasn’t. As anyone who is reading this knows, MLB pulled the All-Star Game from Atlanta for this season as a protest against the Georgia legislature’s latest attempts to keep anyone who isn’t a white Republican from voting.

There were ways to register your disappointment with MLB’s move without embarrassing yourself. Indeed, local politicians like Stacey Abrams and Raphael Warnock did just that. Unfortunately, the Braves themselves did not. Despite likely knowing about it before anyone else, the statement they issued had was more along the lines of a child throwing a tantrum than a reasoned response to the issue. It will be interesting to see if they follow they same “crackdown, then backdown” line that other major Georgia corporations like Coca-Cola and Delta did over the past week. I’m not holding my breath, though.

You can make a reasonable argument that the new law isn’t that bad. Most of these arguments say that things like not being able to distribute food or water to voters waiting in line are gratuitous but not actually that big of a deal. Perhaps in a vacuum, they are now. But let’s consider that the same Legislature that created those lines also passed this law, and then let’s consider that this is just the latest in a long line of attempts at disenfranchisement that has been going on for over a century. I think it’s completely reasonable to consider this context, and when you do, you’re not going to get the benefit of the doubt.